Trespass. Breaking and entry. I’m thinking of alternate titles for this essay, but they don’t convey how it feels to pry off a board and squeeze through a door that has been barred to you—yes, you, Bloomsbury trophy-hunter—and will soon be bulldozed to extinction. Asheham House near Beddingham, East Sussex, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s first country house and “the best place in the world for reading Shakespeare,” as Virginia maintained, sat on land owned by the Blue Circle Cement Works when I broke into it shortly before the house was demolished (despite a protest campaign) in 1994.¹ The cement people had carved a chalk quarry into the Down above the isolated house and, over the decades, dumped their waste in front of it, so that a wood grew where sheep had once clipped the fields. The young trees blocked the superb view across the Ouse Valley but also hid it from passersby. Squatters had been kicked out some years earlier—hence the boards nailed over the pretty Regency french doors on the ground level.

Although the lease was signed by Virginia and her sister Vanessa Bell, the house had been discovered by Leonard and Virginia on a long ramble in mid-September 1911. They would spend the first night of their marriage there almost a year later. Nurses would join them during Virginia’s breakdowns of 1913-15. Leonard remembered the house feeling “romantic, gentle, melancholy, lovely,” and also a little haunted, sounding “as if two people were walking from room to room, opening and shutting doors, sighing, whispering.” The noises at Asheham inspired Virginia’s story, “A Haunted House,” with its ghostly lovers. When I brought up the ghost stories to the no-nonsense editor of Virginia’s diaries, Anne Olivier Bell, she tutted impatiently, but her husband Quentin, Virginia’s nephew, had lived at Asheham as a boy. “That was a rum house,” he said.

Under the board was a sheet of corrugated tin that I bent down to clamber into the small dark sitting room. Light streamed in behind me. Dereliction. Peeling layers of old flowered wallpaper. Squatters’ trash. Houses live through people; without them, they fall into the sameness of decline. I picked up the coal chisel and poked the fireplace ashes. These were the rooms Virginia had agonized over decorating, comparing her cautious experiments in color to the exciting improvisations going on nearby at Charleston, her sister’s house. Here she and Leonard entertained their friends from London and Cambridge, though with an eye on the clock, Leonard always watchful of Virginia’s writing time as well as her health. In April 1914, they lent the house to Maynard Keynes for a reading party. “Did you have a pleasant evening buggering one or more of the young men we left for you?” Vanessa asked him later with typical bravura, “It must have been delicious out on the downs in the afternoon sun—a thing I have often wanted to do.”

Asheham would also become a buffer against the worries and uncertainties of the First World War. Virginia and Leonard took long walks over the Downs and through the farm lanes, picking berries or mushrooms and sighting butterflies, at the same time that she was considering new ways to write fiction, “new forms for our new sensations.”

I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L to come &

mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking

suddenly, ‘This is Earth life.” I seemed to see how earthy it all was,

& I myself an evolved kind of hare; as if a moon-visitor saw me.

Although engaged in writing her last traditional novel, Night and Day (1919), Virginia was experimenting in her shorter fiction, feeling her way toward the stylistic innovations of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925).  Most of the stream-of-consciousness stories in the collection Monday and Tuesday (1921)—like the much-anthologized “The Mark on the Wall”–were written while Virginia lived at Asheham (and at her house in Richmond, a suburb of London).

From the former kitchen, everything of value had long ago been stripped. I paused at the base of the stairs, not sure whether they could take my weight, then went up anyway. In my grainy photos of the upstairs rooms, you can make out either an abandoned wooden bedstead or a kind of low embalming tray—presumably the former, but the house felt creepy enough that I can’t rule out the latter. It also seemed small, until I realized it had been partitioned at some point. Outside afterward, I found a newer, second doorway, also boarded up. Maybe the ghosts lived on that side.

The advantages of Sussex for a country retreat from London are obvious: apart from the beauty of the undulating South Downs–great bowls of grass and cultivated grain, now often vivid yellow with oilseed rape–the train takes less than an hour from King’s Cross to the county town of Lewes. Even in the first years of the twentieth century, when you had to hire a trap at Lewes Station to get into the countryside, the journey was not long. And the crowds, the noise, dinner invitations, garrulous neighbors met by chance—all of it fell away.

After a Sussex holiday with her brother Adrian Stephen, Virginia (then unmarried) rented a small, undistinguished, red brick, semi-detached cottage in Firle—to forestall criticism, she called it a “hideous suburban villa”–beginning January 1911. Her hopes for the place are clear, though, since she named it Little Talland House, after Talland House, the Stephens’ country house at St. Ives, Cornwall, where she spent her childhood summers and would set her best-known novel, To The Lighthouse (1927). Nevertheless, she left it almost the moment she laid eyes on Asheham.

(Firle is the village nearest Charleston Farmhouse, home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Vanessa, Duncan, and Quentin Bell are buried in the churchyard. All this area—a 5000 acre snip of southern England—has been owned by the same family, the Gages, since the fifteenth century. The present owner, the 8^th Viscount Gage, remembers painting with Duncan Grant one or two times and being intimidated by Vanessa Bell over lunch at Charleston. Debo Gage, a descendent of the 4^th Viscount, helped the Charleston Trust buy and restore the farmhouse.)

In summer 1919, the Woolfs were asked to leave Asheham to make room for their landlord’s farm-bailiff. On impulse, Virginia bought the Round House in Lewes (a converted windmill, still standing), but she and Leonard never lived in it because they happened to see, two weeks later, an auctioneer’s notice for Monk’s House in Rodmell, a house they knew and had admired. Although in rough shape, with a damp, sloping kitchen and no toilets, Monk’s House was beautifully situated near the end of what was then the one street in the village. Behind it and down a tiny lane is a small Norman church. Tradition held that Monk’s House dated far enough back to live up to its suggestive name, but Leonard’s research suggested more prosaic 17^th century origins.

The garden was extensive, with enormous elms on one side (soon nicknamed Leonard and Virginia), fruit trees, a vegetable patch, outbuildings—including the earth closet (in American, the outhouse), and the hut that would become Virginia’s writing room. Leonard would make a long strip of lawn into a bowling green. As they watched the pace of development in Sussex over the next few years, the Woolfs anxiously bought the neighboring field to prevent being boxed in on the Downs side of the house or losing their beautiful view.

Virginia painted the drawing room her favorite shade of green and hired her sister and Duncan Grant to decorate the fireplace surrounds and other details. Over the next ten years they also rebuilt the kitchen, added a modest bedroom for Virginia onto the side of the house—the best visual argument against the supposed wealth of the Bloomsbury Group—with large windows, into which a cow puts its head one morning. They also installed a bathroom. For a while afterward, Virginia would comment with delight on every successful flush.

Modernization also played into Virginia’s fantasies of doing without household help, but in fact they were rarely without a servant. Help was cheap and time to write was costly. Cleaning up after breakfast in the 1930s, their servant, Louie Everest, would hear Virginia in the bath above her each morning, talking through scenes: “On and on she went, talk, talk, talk: asking questions and giving herself the answers. I thought there must be two or three people up there with her.”

Although the Woolfs loved company—so happy to see people arrive, as Virginia noted, and equally glad to see them go—the chief virtue of Monk’s House was its peace and quiet. “Back from a good weekend at Rodmell,” Woolf wrote in her diary in 1932,  ”A weekend of no talking, sinking at once into deep, safe book-reading; and then sleep; with the may tree like a breaking wave outside; and all the garden mounds of green . . .”

The house remains romantic and evocative. I never set out to go there. In October 1987 I was on my way to Lamb House in the large village of Rye, where Henry James had lived, when a wrong turn put me on the outskirts of Lewes. I spotted a small wooden sign for Monk’s House, about two miles down the Newhaven Road, and remembered that this was Virginia Woolf’s summer place.  Why not see it?

On this impulse hinges my whole career as a writer. If I’d carried on toward Rye, I might have become a James scholar, or written Jamesian fiction, or gone home to Arizona and taught high school English. I could have opened an art gallery. I could have gone to medical school. I could be rich right now. Instead I drove to Rodmell and changed my life.  Because Monk’s House was closed, I stayed the night in the village, hoping to make my literary pilgrimage the next day. A hurricane that night that took down hundreds of trees in the south of England and I was trapped in Sussex. I became a charitable project for the landlady at my B & B, was introduced to Quentin Bell, and unknowingly set in motion the machinery that would result some years later in my editing Vanessa Bell’s letters, my first book.

I’ve still never seen Lamb House. Such are the iron workings of fate.

Monk’s House is operated by the National Trust and has a resident family (and a parking lot in that field the Woolfs so scrupulously kept vacant). A few days a week they unlock the gate and let in tourists to the lower level of the house—restored to its appearance in about the mid-1930s—and the gorgeous garden. While the elms are gone—the one under which Virginia’s ashes were buried came down in a storm, and Leonard’s succumbed to Dutch elm disease not long before my first visit to the house—Leonard’s bowling green is kept neatly mowed, his greenhouse is nicely maintained, and you can peer into Virginia’s writing cottage, expanded slightly in the 1960s to become a studio for Leonard’s companion, Trekkie Parsons. The moody Stephen Tomlin bust of Virginia sits on a flint wall.

A friend of mine took a cutting from one of Leonard’s prize geraniums (he was active in the Rodmell Horticultural Society), so that I now have a third-generation Monk’s House geranium growing in my San Francisco garden. Like a literary influence, I’ve made it my own—characteristically, a little rangy and unkempt, dreaming of England while it fights off a native grass incursion. Leonard would not be pleased.

San Francisco writer Regina Marler explored the Bloomsbury industry in Bloomsbury Pie and also edited Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. She has an essay forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group.

1. “Asheham,” an older spelling, was preferred by Virginia, but the house is also known as Asham. [↩]

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